St. John Paul II, the Pope Who Made More Saints Than Everyone Before Him
If you want to know why the calendar looks the way it does now, he is most of the answer.
Every article on this site about how the Church makes a saint is describing a system that one man substantially redesigned, and his feast is this week.
John Paul II canonized 482 people and beatified more than thirteen hundred. That is more canonizations than all the popes of the preceding four centuries combined, going back to the point where Rome began keeping the process in a single office. If the calendar seems crowded, this is why.
He also rewrote the rules that produce them, which is the less famous half of the story and the more consequential one.
Wadowice
Karol Wojtyla was born in 1920 in a small town southwest of Krakow. His mother died when he was eight, his older brother when he was twelve, his father when he was twenty. By the age of twenty he had buried his entire immediate family.
He was an athlete and an actor, seriously enough that he considered the stage as a career and went on writing plays and poetry for the rest of his life. When the Germans occupied Poland and closed the universities he worked in a limestone quarry and then a chemical factory, and studied for the priesthood in an underground seminary run out of the archbishop’s residence in Krakow, which was a capital offense.
He was ordained in 1946, became archbishop of Krakow, and spent two decades as a bishop under a communist government that monitored him closely and refused him permission to build churches.
In October 1978 the cardinals elected him. He was fifty-eight, and the first non-Italian pope in four hundred and fifty-five years.
What he changed in 1983
Five years into the pontificate he issued a document reorganizing how causes for sainthood are conducted, and the change was structural.
The old procedure was built like a trial. There was a formal adversary, the Promoter of the Faith, whose job was to attack the case: to find every weakness in the evidence and argue against the candidate. The popular name for that office is the devil’s advocate, and the phrase entered ordinary English from this exact source.
The 1983 reform replaced the courtroom with a research project. Instead of prosecution and defense, a cause now assembles a historical dossier, reviewed by historical and theological consultors, with an official whose job is to guard the integrity of the procedure rather than to oppose the candidate.
He also cut the number of miracles required. Under the older system a cause typically needed two verified miracles to be beatified and two more to be canonized. After 1983 it is one and one, with martyrs requiring none for beatification.
Then he used the new machinery heavily, which is how the arithmetic got to 482.
The argument about it
This was and is debated, and the debate is worth stating because it is a real one and it is about process rather than about anybody’s holiness.
The case against: that removing the adversary removed a useful discipline, that halving the miracle requirement lowered the bar, and that a very large number of canonizations devalues the currency. Saints are supposed to be exceptional, and the objection is that a crowded calendar makes them look routine.
The case for, which was his own: that the old system was so slow and so expensive that in practice it canonized almost exclusively European clergy and members of religious orders, because those were the only causes with institutions wealthy and patient enough to fund a century of litigation. Opening it up produced saints from Korea, Vietnam, Mexico, Uganda, Sudan and the Pacific, and a great many lay people, which matches what the Church says it believes about who gets to be holy.
Both of those are fair, and they are not really in conflict. He traded a slower, narrower, more adversarial process for a faster and wider one, and got the predictable advantages and the predictable costs of doing that.
The ones he was personally involved with
He was the pope who canonized Padre Pio, to whom he had made his confession in 1947 as a young Polish priest, fifty-five years before raising him to the altars.
He waived the five-year waiting period so that Mother Teresa’s cause could open two years after her death, and he beatified her himself.
He canonized Maximilian Kolbe as a martyr in 1982 over the objection of commissions that could not agree whether a man who volunteered for another prisoner’s death met the definition, and settled the matter by declaring him a martyr of charity.
In each of those he was doing something more specific than approving paperwork. He had views about what sanctity looked like, and the record shows him pressing them.
Fifty-eight to eighty-four
The pontificate ran twenty-six and a half years, the second longest in history. He made a hundred and four foreign journeys and visited a hundred and twenty-nine countries, which is more travel than every pope before him put together, by a wide margin.
In 1981 a gunman shot him in St Peter’s Square. He survived, and two years later went to the prison and sat with the man who had done it, and afterward would not say publicly what they discussed.
The last years were not hidden. He had Parkinson’s disease and let himself be seen with it: the tremor, the slurred speech, the inability to finish a text he was reading. For a man who had been an athlete and an actor, that was a deliberate choice about what a public life is for.
Santo subito
He died in April 2005, and the crowds at the funeral held up signs reading santo subito: sainthood now.
Benedict XVI waived the five-year wait in his case too, the way John Paul had waived it for Mother Teresa, and the cause opened within weeks. He was beatified in 2011 and canonized in 2014, nine years from death to altar, which by the usual standards is very fast indeed, and faster than almost anyone he canonized himself.
Francis canonized him alongside John XXIII, and for John XXIII waived the second miracle entirely, which tells you the direction the process has continued to move.
October 22
His feast is not the day he died. April 2 falls in the Easter season, which is crowded with things that outrank a pope.
So his day is October 22, the anniversary of the Mass in 1978 at which his pontificate formally began, and at which he said the line that followed him for the next twenty-six years: do not be afraid.
It is a fitting choice for him specifically. Most saints are remembered on the day they finished. He is remembered on the day he started.
A saint like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of Saints by Mail: printed, reverent, and mailed to your door. A thoughtful gift for godchildren, families, and anyone who loves the saints.